Keeping Projects on Track Amid High Employee Turnover

STEVE HENDERSHOT

In an age of unrelenting turnover, there’s added pressure on project leaders to keep projects on track. The thing is, making sure teams deliver value amidst upheaval isn’t just good for the projects themselves—it also helps strengthen teams and hold them together because people want to know that their work is meaningful.

KIERSTIN GRAY

Project managers are the front line because when a team member doesn’t feel like what they’re doing is providing value, when the client doesn’t believe that what the team is delivering is providing value, the only person who is in a position to actually change that is the project manager.

NARRATOR

The world is changing fast. And every day, project professionals are turning ideas into reality—delivering value to their organizations and society as a whole. On Projectified^®, we’ll help you stay on top of the trends and see what’s ahead for The Project Economy—and your career.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

This is Projectified^®. I’m Steve Hendershot.

Continuity. Stability. Institutional knowledge. These factors help teams deliver successful projects, but they can be challenging to come by in today’s business landscape. People across industries have been reevaluating their relationships with work, some quitting their jobs to find new opportunities—sometimes even along wholly different career paths—that better align with their priorities and lifestyles. The global exodus of employees is among PMI’s 2022 Global Megatrends. Along with labor shortages, organizations are also contending with the effects of geopolitical crises, inflation and an increasingly volatile global economy.

In the face of all this uncertainty, project leaders have to continue to execute. And companies are in need of project talent that can make it happen: The global economy needs 25 million new project professionals to meet global talent demands by 2030, according to PMI’s latest Talent Gap report.

Today we’re speaking to a couple of leaders about how they and their teams keep projects on track in the face of resourcing and other challenges. We begin in Brooklyn, New York, with Kierstin Gray, a program director at product design company Argodesign.

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STEVE HENDERSHOT

I want to start with a zoom-out view and ask you about the effect of high turnover. What stresses does that put on an organization, as well as a specific project or project team?

KIERSTIN GRAY

One of the critical components of having a project team that people overlook is that you’re creating an ecosystem of people. So one of the challenges when you actually have that linchpin—that, I would say, hub to the entire team, which is often the project manager—when that is in a bit of flux, it not only creates a bit of friction in terms of being able to do the basic delivery of whatever you’re trying to achieve, whether that is specific discrete deliverables by the team or if it’s larger strategic objectives, it’s not just that that’s being disrupted. It’s also the emotional weight that happens on teams.

As we’ve started to see a lot of disruption in terms of people leaving teams and people joining companies and trying to find different opportunities in this time, it’s difficult for businesses to really compensate because they haven’t really thought about what the emotional cost, as well as the financial cost, will be of losing a particular person. When you have a project manager who is well-liked on a team, the team hums together. There’s that je ne sais quoi which can’t really be quantified in terms of the hours that they spend or the cost of that resource.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

So what is at stake there? Because it sounds like it’s not just that you might fall behind because there is a missed date or deliverable. There is something harder to quantify, like the whole thing is just going to lose a little bit of coherence or crafted-ness.

KIERSTIN GRAY

One of the fundamental elements of looking at projects from a PMI perspective is to say, “Okay, I know I have to achieve a certain number of things in this project, and I want to make sure not just that I have the resources, but I have the right resources.” And part of that is chemistry. So some of the things that you seem to kind of miss in these scenarios is, you may have a program or a project lead who’s quite efficient at being able to motivate the team, which means that the team is actually delivering a little bit faster than they possibly would with, say, someone else. They feel a certain level of comfort. This particular person brings a unique perspective based off of their experience and their expertise.

These are sort of the things that we don’t typically track because often, we’re just simply looking at, “Okay, how many days does it take to get it done? How much money is it going to take? What do we need to deliver, and can we deliver it?” And there are a lot of nuances in each of those interactions that we simply can’t ignore because, say, the project manager leaves. There’s a lot of turnover. Someone, say, a designer or a developer, has now seen two or three people go through the team, and starts asking themselves, “Well, if I see this kind of turnover and I’ve lost the people I like working with, is it really worth working here anymore? Do I like working here? Do I like the people that I work with?” So there are some of these nuanced and kind of intricacies of humanity, right? The way that we like to work with people, how we perceive ourselves getting along with people, that make the work, the task, worthwhile that start to suffer when we find that we’re on teams that have high turnover or that we can’t find reliable colleagues to work with.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

There has always been turnover and people leaving jobs, but how much more severe is what we’re experiencing now and have experienced for the last couple of years? And how much more acute is this?

KIERSTIN GRAY

From my own personal point of view, what we’re seeing now is going to be the new normal. I mean, it has always been true that someone could walk away from a job at any point in time; and to your point, the activity or the behavior we’re seeing, it’s not new. I think that what we’re finding is that it’s becoming more culturally acceptable for somebody to walk away from a job. What we’re seeing now, this reshuffle, it’s about people reprioritizing the context of their career, the concept of a career, of a job, and instead of pinning it on “I desire to aspire to some sort of socioeconomic norm or socioeconomic level that I want to be rich or I want to live in a certain kind of house or have a certain kind of lifestyle,” it’s more centered on purpose.

If their metric is no longer money, we need to start thinking about our coaching and development, what we offer people in [the] way of benefits, not just financial, but what kind of well-being you’re offering someone in the experience that they’re having with your company. These are the things that all companies are going to really have to consider and design their employee experience around in order to be able to retain great talent.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

What should project managers and organizations be doing, knowing that no matter how well you dial in and explore employee experience, sometimes people will leave? What can you do to plan for that moment when somebody leaves in the middle of a critical project to keep it going with maximal coherence?

KIERSTIN GRAY

I think that there are a lot of industries for which the waterfall approach is always going to be the way. I mean, there’s a certain level of quality assurance and there are certain things that you just don’t want happening in an agile manner; you do need to have certain steps follow others when you’re looking at a project for certain industries and for certain subjects. I think it’s about adopting a more agile philosophy in terms of how you’re approaching the work. Part of the idea of agile is that you’re sharing knowledge, and there is shared ownership of what the outcome might be. And when you start to look at that from a project management standpoint, maybe that means that a project manager who is a part of a team of 10 is each week reporting out to their colleagues about what exactly that experience has been and what [the] pros and cons might be. So that way if another person steps into that role, they have a sense of what’s going on. There are certain consistencies that we have from project to project, and it’s about sharing that perspective so that someone can be somewhat successful when stepping into the role.

When a team knows that the information is being shared openly and freely across numerous people or even folks that they may not see every single day in a scrum, there’s a sense of I’d say contentment with the situation because they know that even if the characters may change, the outcome is still going to be more or less the same. They know what to expect. We all tend to do better when we understand what we’re working toward or understand conceptually how our individual actions might affect the whole. So I think that when it comes to tactical steps that companies can take, not having such a literal idea that the work—quote, unquote—has to be done one way or another, but looking at the people who are achieving the work, looking at what we’re trying to achieve and the outcomes we’re trying to meet, and then seeing how we can share some of that knowledge and share some of that experience with each other to make it possible for us to then come up with creative ways to get around challenges as they will occur in a project cycle, which are already expected, but not always planned for.

STEVE HENDERSHOT

Are there any good practices you would share with project leaders when it comes to building the possibility of turnover into a project?

KIERSTIN GRAY

Many of the challenges that projects have when it comes to missed deliverables, incomplete deliverables, is about the strength of the communication and trust and relationships that exist between the members of the team. You’re always going to shape your plan, whether it is “I’m going to have another developer sit alongside my main developer every couple of weeks just to know what they know,” “I’m going to use our retrospectives or potentially postmortems if it’s a waterfall project or maybe even standups or other informal and formal meetings to be able to always tie back to make sure that the project or the initiative is safeguarded”; those kinds of decisions you should actively make as you’re setting up the project roles, as you’re setting up the project itself.

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STEVE HENDERSHOT

CEOs around the world told The Conference Board that attracting and retaining talent is their top priority. One factor in employee discussions is remote work. Not only do some people prefer their home office to commuting, but also lots of people realize that thanks to the internet, they can work for companies based anywhere in the world. That dynamic is very much at work in São Paulo, where Vitor Amaral is CTO of Bitz, a digital wallet within Banco Bradesco. Projectified^®’s Hannah LaBelle asked Vitor how he and his teams are keeping projects on track with tech jobs in high demand and talent working across the globe.

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HANNAH LABELLE

Companies everywhere are facing this shift, with people reevaluating their relationship with work and their work opportunities. How is this impacting your sector and region?

VITOR AMARAL

Here in Latin America especially, and I can talk specifically here about Brazil, COVID reached us in a very, very strong and a bad way, and that made a lot of people here really, really start rethinking what they were doing. Should I take this moment here to really start doing something that I really would be proud of in the future when I look back? We see here in the technology area a lot of people really, and in the senior positions mainly, deciding to take another road. They want to change their lifestyle. They want to do other things. They want to go back to study; they don’t want to do that life anymore. This is one aspect, this is one percentage of people that are doing that, specifically in technology.

But what is happening here also is that still the technology demand is really increasing, and we have a lot of open positions, not only here in Brazil, but all over the world. And the engineers, the software developers, testers that we have here in Brazil, the project managers, what is happening is that all over the world as everybody wants to work remotely, geographic [location] is not an issue anymore, right? So we are seeing here a lot in Brazil too [is] people that are starting [to] work for companies that are abroad. They’re quitting their local job here to start working—still living in Brazil, living in their houses—working from home, but they’re working for companies in the U.S. or in Europe.

HANNAH LABELLE

As you’re seeing this turnover, how are project leaders at your company keeping projects on track and team members engaged? Are there any specific strategies that they’re using?

VITOR AMARAL

We always have the challenge of doing the projects with the cost that we have, budget, with the time that we have planned, and with the resources that we have planned. But before COVID, we had attrition. We had people leaving projects in the middle of the project, etc. But what happened here is that attrition increased because of all the things that we said here, right?

One thing that I talked to the managers [about] here is to have these one-on-one [meetings] with the team members every time they can so they can really understand how they’re feeling, if they’re having any trouble, if they have any problem, and understanding how they can help. During the pandemic, we hired people completely remotely. It was a big challenge. So what we are trying to do here is to just make sure that we have these one-on-ones to discuss things that are really related to the work, to the project, and also have time to just chat in group, or individually, but just have a moment here to have conversations that are not all related to work. So this is something that is really helping us. We’re seeing here the team is really engaging more when we are doing this.

HANNAH LABELLE

And do you think that also kind of helps you all in case there are times of flux? Whether it’s someone needs to adjust given resourcing challenges, or maybe a project needs to switch leads, that if you’ve had these conversations, it keeps everybody on the same page as to where the work is at to keep things running?

VITOR AMARAL

Not only communicating frequently as we said—trying to have time to connect and make sure that everybody is on the same page, I would say—but also to record those things. We have a lot of tools nowadays that you can place here a ticket or a task or something like that so you cannot forget, right, to resolve that issue or that question or that thought. I would say that it’s really, really important to try to make sure that the communication is flowing, right, as you said, to the whole team. But also making sure that all the aspects of this communication is being registered so people can really have access to that and make sure that, “Okay, that’s what we discussed. Here’s what we agreed on so we can move forward.”

HANNAH LABELLE

What other aspects of project planning can really help if there is turnover on a team?

VITOR AMARAL

Nowadays, it has been more necessary than it used to be to make sure that the requirements of the projects are really clarified and explained upfront. We have this idea, some companies and some folks, that because we are now moving everything to agile that we can make not very specific requirements. That’s one of the main reasons for failure in the projects. And now that we are [working] remotely, most of the time not seeing everybody physically, it’s really important to make sure that the requirements are being detailed in a very good way. We need here to get back to our written skills to make sure that anyone can check that later, can really understand and make sure that from that [we] can build the epics, the stories, the tasks, conditions, the criteria, and so on. I would say here for all the project managers and project teams, let’s make sure that the requirements are really, really, really well-written, well-detailed and contain everything that we need. Because that for sure is the beginning here for us to make sure that we’re going to deliver the project as we expect.

HANNAH LABELLE

So, obviously part of this discussion is talent retention. What are some ways that you’re working to keep the project talent that you have?

VITOR AMARAL

So the talent retention was always one thing in the agenda of the leadership. The methods that we used to identify the talents and to try to compensate them financially and with training and things like that, they’re still valid. That’s always being applied, and that’s always being conducted very often. But I think really what is making people here—and especially people that are doing projects with technology—is to show what is the end state of the project. Where that will lead, what change or what impact that project will do in the company. We are seeing more often here, and mainly because of the agile methodology that now everybody is practically using, we are starting things in a very small way, like an MVP [minimum viable product], and we are progressing, evolving and enhancing the solutions. And the project leaders and the project teams, they’re really engaging to that kind of spirit, right? Because they’re seeing that it is their effort that is making that little change happen.

The other thing I think mainly what we are trying to do here, of course, is really to try to find this flexibility to do work remotely. But also, a flexibility that does not affect the project at all, the whole members of the team at all. Sometimes, you can have some flexibility in the time that the person starts working or finish the work, etc., but for the main points here, you need to be connected. You need to be working together. And one other thing here that I believe that we are, and all the companies here are, mostly now trying to do is really to change a little bit the workspace, to transform the work environment in a more collaborative way. So as you have a lot of people working remotely now, when you bring these people together physically at work, you can have a place where they can really take advantage of being together and sharing ideas and collaborating with each other.

HANNAH LABELLE

How do you expect resourcing challenges to change over the next few years, and how will it affect project leaders?

VITOR AMARAL

I think companies overall are trying to really make sure that they redesign what they want to do, how they want to serve the market that they are there for. And that will for sure reflect in creating projects that are more significant—projects that are really important to the company that really can help the company or the customers. So I see that we’re going to have projects with purpose, I would say here, more often, and that will help us to retain, as we said, the talents, to acquire new people to work here together, and for a good reason.

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STEVE HENDERSHOT

In today’s ever-evolving business landscape, project leaders are uncovering ways to stay on track by increasing resilience and building engagement and cohesion in teams. It’s also an opportunity for innovation and discovering new ways to work and to deliver project value.

NARRATOR

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